


Things Fall Apart

by TheWrongKindOfPC



Category: Bandom, The Academy Is...
Genre: Gen, M/M, Major Character Injury, Post-Split
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-23
Updated: 2012-10-23
Packaged: 2017-11-16 21:58:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sisky goes, and then he comes back. The going part is a whole hell of a lot easier, though.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Fall Apart

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to lalejandra for being such an awesome beta, and for telling me that the problem with the end was that it wasn't over. Title is from W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming."

It doesn’t have to be a big deal, being in a new band. That’s what the Butcher says, anyway, and he probably knows. The Academy wasn’t his first and won’t be his last band, so he must know how to think of it as a job and not as a _life_.

“Hey, that’s not fair,” The Butcher says. He says it with authority, too—a sort of wounded familiarity that comes from spending five to seven months of the year in constant contact with each other since Sisky was a teenager. The Butcher is still the one Sisky wants by his side, kicking ass and taking names, band or no band—or at least getting stoned and giggling about the idea of literal ass-kicking. The Butcher is late night snuggles and hotel beds and the smell of turpentine, and it’s been a long time since Sisky’s had any of that in his life, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, he knows.

The Butcher is still the guy who always answers when Sisky calls him late at night, even if he does sigh down the line to Sisky these days. Probably Sisky should be more glad he picks up the phone than frustrated at what he says when he does. Sisky isn’t exactly trying to change his attitude, but he is thinking that maybe at some point he should try.

Tonight is not that night, though. “Why not?” he asks, and he’s trying not to sound like a child, but he’s still pretty sure he does, even more than when he actually was one, maybe. “You did your work and you got paid, didn’t you? Sounds like a job to me. And you’ve moved on pretty quick.”

The Butcher is in South America with Cobra and Justin Bieber—and, sure, Sisky is in a new band, too, but there’s moving on and then there is _moving on_ , and that is crazy shit right there, that is, like, moving on from the realm of reality and right into, ‘Is that happening or am I tripping balls?’ Justin Bieber is spending more time with the Butcher than Sisky is, and that just—well, it sucks.

He sighs again. The Butcher never used to be big on sighing, except for sometimes when Bill’s drama-queenerey had moved past funny to fucking frustrating. 

“Dude. Enjoy the tour, get to know the guys better, have fun. It doesn’t have to be the end of the world.”

If Sisky wanted to hear this kind of comforting bullshit, he would call his mom. Enough is enough. He swears, he’s not going to be the one calling first next time.

…

“Hello?” The Butcher sounds like he might have actually been asleep this time. That’s okay, though.

“Doesn’t have to be a big deal _my ass_ ,” is what Sisky opens with, because he’s found, in life, that it’s pretty much always better to jump right in when he’s spoiling for a fight. “Mike is _different_.” 

Mike is, in fact, showered and neatly clean-shaven, and though the hair has been shorter for a while, it looks ten times more respectable now. He is also athletic and healthy and only smoking socially, and Sisky has been around him for six hours and he hasn’t tried to cause anyone physical pain once.

He seems calm and well-adjusted and _happy_ and it is really pissing Sisky off.

To add insult to injury, Chizzy came up from the city to meet them both for lunch, and seemed completely unbothered by the new Mike. Sisky doesn’t think that’s quite fair. He’s the one who met Mike longer ago, when the shadows of the chess-geek, swim-teaming kid who is reasserting himself now was still clinging to him the first time. _He_ has known Mike longer, _he_ should be even more comfortable than Chislett—who, after all, only met Mike when he was in full blown rock-star persona—with the new Mike. He just—he just can’t, is all, okay? He doesn’t know how else to say it.

“Sisky Biz,” the Butcher says, low and soft and a little exhausted, “sometimes people just grow up.” 

Just to prove him wrong, Sisky hangs up, and, for good measure, throws his phone across the room.

…

Adam goes to visit Bill for a few days, spends some time playing with the baby who isn’t a baby anymore, chasing her around the yard as she shrieks and dives under chairs like a wild creature. He listens to Bill talk about home life, and what he is writing, and how he is glad everything—well. It is good and then it is not good and then it’s kind of okay again and he still doesn’t call the Butcher.

…

It has been three days since it happened when Sisky gets the call. It’s so strange to him, how not that long ago, he would have been near the top of the list of people to call. Not that long ago, he might have _been there_ —him or Chiz or Mike or Bill. One of them might have been there and then it might never have happened.

It’s the Butcher’s brother who calls him, so that’s nice. It’s even nicer when he says he did because Andy asked him to. Still, it’s a long list, the list of hurt and broken bones and things. When they get off the phone, Sisky sits back down on the bed. Then he stands up. He kind of wants to punch a wall, doesn’t, wonders if maybe the Butcher is on to something with this whole ‘growing up’ thing. Then he goes for his computer and books a flight.

…

Sisky is bracing himself for a hospital, after he flies in. He is bracing himself for hospital smells and hospital feelings and confusing-as-fuck hospital parking lots for his rented car, so it’s a good thing he texts before driving over, or he would have gotten sucked into the hospital vortex for nothing.

The Butcher is at his mom’s, which makes sense—Sisky thinks he’d probably be at his mom’s house, too, after something like this. He follows the directions google gives him to get there, sits in the driveway in the rental car for fifteen minutes before getting out, then sits on the hood for a smoke before he knocks. But he gets there, which is the important thing.

The Butcher’s mom is pale and a little more tearful than Sisky remembers from meeting her before, but he guesses that is maybe something he should have been expecting. She lets him in, and even smiles at him, tells him Andy is camped out in the living room, so he smiles back, gives her a kind of awkward hug, all loose arms and back patting, and makes his way down the hall.

He can’t really look at the Butcher like this, and that is something he hadn’t been bracing himself for, so now he’s kind of staring at the wall.

“You grew a beard?”

He looks down, though, at that, and, yeah, the Butcher’s face looks awful, but he’s kind of smiling anyway, which looks painful, must be taking a bit of effort. If he’s making that kind of effort to be smiling, Sisky figures he should at least be able to make the effort to look back at him. He thinks he can, anyway. He touches his face, a little self-conscious, and nods.

“Thanks for coming, man. You really didn’t have to.”

Sisky wasn’t thinking of it like that, like having to or not having to—he wasn’t even thinking about whether he should, and now that it is too late not to, he would rather continue not thinking of it. He’s just here, and it’s not about any of that, and he doesn’t know how to say it, not any of it, so he sits down on the floor next to the couch and digs through his backpack, saying, “I got you one of the tiny airplane bottles of Jack. I know you like those.”

The Butcher likes the label on Jack Daniels. He calls it an American classic. Sisky finds it and tries to hand it over, but the Butcher reaches out with a hand that has splinted fingers, fumbles a little, and Sisky is staring too hard at the splints to be much help, so it doesn’t really work. The bottle drops to the beige-ish carpet with a little sloshing sound that shouldn’t even be audible, but they are both being so quiet.

It’s weird—he looks so different now than any time Sisky pictured him ever, really. His face looks alien and strange, kind of unearthly, his smile strained, but when he is right here, right in front of Sisky, Sisky isn’t capable of thinking of him as the distant, affectionate, frustrated stranger he has been talking to for months.

“I’ll have to save it till I’m not on so many drugs, anyway," The Butcher says with another painful looking smile.

…

Sisky stays. At first, he stays at a motel, but on the third night, the Butcher’s mom just tells him he can have the guest room, since Andy is pretty well settled in the living room. He hangs around and it is kind of awkward and weird sometimes he feels a bit like a third wheel, or a fourth wheel, or a fifth, depending on how many of the Butcher’s family are there at a given time—no matter the number, generally the kind of useless wheel.

Butcher’s family actually play Scrabble, and it is not Sisky’s game, not really, he’s not the best speller, especially under pressure, and he could maybe beat Chizzy, but not much of anyone else. After the third game, the Butcher starts playing on a team with him.

“Don’t you have to get back to your band?” The Butcher asks him after the first week. Sisky shrugs.

“We just got back from Australia. We agreed to take some down-time, anyway.” The truth is he’s been kind of bad at communicating with them, answering their calls via text, being vague about when he can start practicing with them. They can deal, though.

It’s kind of good that he’s there when Andy decides it’s time to go back to his own apartment, because his mom thinks it’s too early, but at least with Sisky there, he won’t be _alone_. Sisky also thinks it’s too soon, and he’s not sure how much help he’ll be if anything goes wrong. The Butcher is clearly going crazy stuck there, though, so he doesn’t say anything, just opens the windows in the apartment when they get there, trying to air out the musty, unlived-in smell.

…

Sisky is getting to the point where he won’t have a band again if he doesn’t go talk to them soon, and he’s not sure he’s ready for that, even if these guys aren’t family, exactly. And as his mom said to him the other night, he still made a commitment to them. The Butcher says he should go, too, so he gets a bus ticket, since speed isn’t so important this trip, and then he sits in front of the computer and lets the screen-saver take over. 

The Butcher says, “It’s not that I want you to go, Sisky.”

Sisky nods. That’s nice. It is.

“When is your ticket for?”

“Tomorrow at three.” Sisky hadn’t seen the point of dragging it out, now that he’s decided to go.

“You know what we’ve got time for, then?” Butcher asks, and he sounds over-the-top excited. “We can go to the mall.”

He’s been craving food-court buffalo wings for weeks, so this kind of almost makes sense. Still, it’s not exactly screaming ‘last night blow-out.’

“Do you have any better ideas?”

Sisky can’t think of any.

…

It’s stupid, their faces chicken-wing greasy, and they elbow past the gaggle of preteens who are also quite obviously making their way toward the photobooth, laughing when they make it there first, laughing through the first click. Then the Butcher turns toward him, says, “You should go, but then you should come back," and then kisses him.

It’s nothing like stoned makeouts in the back lounge, messy and warm and wet; it’s more of a smack, a smooch—a statement, not a feeling. The picture must be spitting out the side of the booth for the waiting kids to see—Sisky smiling, smile gone quiet at those words, then kissing, kissing, laughing, kissing, end of photos. 

Sisky takes one of the strips home with him on the bus the next day.

…

Sisky goes, and then he comes back. The going part is a whole hell of a lot easier, though.

…

Max is a good guy. Sisky knows that, has always known that. He wouldn’t have wanted to be in Max’s band, whether he was a fan or not, if the guy wasn’t a pretty great human being. Sisky has always known, but when he has far away, when he was distracted, when he was scared, talking to Max Bemis in any kind of rational, functional we-are-in-a-band-together kind of way had seemed impossible, and so he hadn’t, and now Max Bemis is pushing his fingers through his hair and looking at Sisky like he doesn’t know what to do with him.

“Look, we all have our shit we go through, I know that better than anyone, and I’d be a pretty massive hypocrite if I said there was no room for working your shit out in this band, but to get that kind of consideration from us, you have to, you know _be a part of this band_.”

Sisky could snap back, at that. He could sneer and apologize that his friend hadn’t gotten attacked at a time more convenient to Max. Max looks tired, though, and he really is showing amazing restraint in not having left several voicemails worth of screaming at Sisky for not ever answering his phone or calling back, the last few weeks, so instead he lets his own corner of a tired smile show, says, “I know,” and “I’m sorry,” and “If you give me another shot, I’m pretty sure it will never happen again.”

Max really is a nice guy, so he says, “Well, we all need a break now and then,” and leaves it at that.

…

Sisky’s mom is both more and less understanding. Or maybe it’s that she’s definitely more understanding, he’s just not sure he likes what she understands. She opens the door and says, “Oh, baby,” then pretends she was talking about the cat, not him. She sits him down at the counter, and talks about Baby’s last vet appointment for a while, pours him a glass of juice and asks, “So how’s your friend doing?”

Andy’s doing alright, he’s coming back strong, Sisky can tell, but the reason he has anything he needs to be coming back from still makes something simmer with anger deep in Sisky’s chest. He says, “How do you think?” but this isn’t his mom’s fault. He breathes out. He says, “He’s getting better,” and “The guys are doing this t-shirt thing, you know? Like a benefit. So that should be good.”

She nods. “I thought they might do something. They’re good boys.”

Sisky laughs at that, can’t quite help it. “I guess so.”

“I always wondered,” his mom says, “If something like this might happen. If I made the right choice, letting you go.” She turns away, pours a glass of juice, and puts it on the counter in front of him.

“You thought the Butch—Andy might get attacked?”

“No, sweetie, of course not. I just—I wondered if you were too young, when you left school to start touring. I wondered what that would leave you with when it ended.”

That’s not what Sisky had been expecting to hear at all. Maybe he should have been. “You knew it was ending?”

Sisky hadn’t, not really. There had been fighting and there hadn’t been as many songs, and then the Butcher and Chislett left, but he’d been sure that the band would make it. Bill and Mike had fought and fought, had tried and discarded the idea of looking to Sisky for a tie-breaking vote, had eventually moved on to fighting and writing and fighting alone, and Sisky had sat in another room, in another building, and been so sure that they would come back, and they would have songs, and the songs could be _stupid as fuck_ , Sisky wouldn’t care, because they would be theirs, and he would make the bass-line rock, and then they would go on tour, and it would be fine.

They’d expected him to know, when it was over. Bill had said it like that, the three of them at some shitty diner, and they could almost have been in high school all over again except that now they were ending a band instead of starting one, and Bill had said, “We’ve all known this was coming.” Mike had nodded. Sisky had felt stupid and young and blindsided.

Almost a year later, Sisky is sitting in his mom’s kitchen, and she is telling him, “I didn’t know when, but you boys were just babies. You weren’t going to be doing the same thing forever. But you didn’t seem to know that.” Sisky really hadn’t. 

His mom nudges the glass of juice over closer to him and asks, “Want me to call Jason? We can order in, have a family dinner. Pizza, baby,” like Sisky is thirteen and not trying to make decisions about the rest of his life _quite_ yet, like pizza and some time with his big brother can fix everything. Still, it sounds pretty good. “Sure,” Sisky says, and nods, for a little extra emphasis.

…

Later, when Jason has gone home to his place, which is not here beneath their mother’s roof (Sisky’s place is not here either anymore, but he likes to pretend more often), Sisky’s phone rings. It startles him, since he’s had the thing on silent constantly for the last few weeks, but he’s trying to be less avoidant of everything in the world, so the ringer is on, and now it is ringing.

That’s only the first step, he reminds himself—phones ring for reasons, you’re supposed to answer them after that. He almost doesn’t, since Baby is asleep on his leg, but his phone is just close enough that he wouldn’t have to move her to answer it, so he kind of has to. Anything else would just be weak. “Stupid cat,” he mutters. Stupid cat could have, like, kicked his phone further away when jumping on the couch or something. He pets Baby to show he didn’t mean it, then, finally, answers.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” the Butcher says, “How was the trip back?”

“The usual.” Sisky is not really sure what to say to such a small-talk-ey opening. “No crying babies, so a little above average.”

“That’s good.” It occurs to Sisky that maybe he’s not the only person feeling a little awkward about this conversation. He’s not sure why, he doesn’t think things were any more tense than ever when he left, but maybe he should go with it—take advantage of the awkwardness. Maybe there should have been more of it sooner. Maybe he should have asked the Butcher, “Why did you leave?” sooner, maybe even when it happened.

He hadn’t, but he can now, does, adds, “Did you know the whole thing was over? Because apparently that’s something I should have known. Maybe you should have tipped me off.” The Butcher always knew how Sisky sometimes let the obvious pass him by.

That’s probably not fair. Sisky hasn’t been particularly fair in any of his reaction to this shift in his life, though, and he’s not sure how to start now.

“Maybe I should have,” the Butcher says, and he sounds tired, he sounds sick, he sounds like himself after three weeks of touring, or like he sounded when Sisky was in the hospital with his hand. This time it was Andy who was in the hospital, though—it was the Butcher who was hurt, and Sisky is not being fair because he doesn’t want to be, but it’s hard to remember that when the Butcher is saying, “Maybe I should have, but I was pretty sure you didn’t want to hear it,” and yeah, that does sound like Sisky. “I didn’t want to lose touch with you when it did.”

Sisky has to laugh at that. “That worked out real well for you, didn’t it.” He knows he hasn’t exactly been a treat to talk to lately.

The Butcher sounds surprised, though, says, “It did. You’re talking to me now, aren’t you? And you came, before.”

“I left, though.” Andy told him to, but he’d still left, he is still not there now, and the Butcher is tired and probably in pain, and Sisky has a strip of photobooth pictures and an unclear picture of where any of his relationships stand, and petulant tone that seems to be turning into a habit, and he’s pretty sure he’s not anybody’s idea of a good deal.

“But you could come back. You will, right?” Sisky’s got a couple more things to take care of, first, but he’s starting to think that he will.

“Yeah, okay.”

…

Sisky goes, and comes back.


End file.
